


Domesticity

by tatarrific



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2542283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatarrific/pseuds/tatarrific
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Future ficlet, AU/Cannon-ish - it's vague enough to go either way.  Just a kind of 'a scene in the life of' - Delphine comes home to find that Cosima's been busy.. in her own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domesticity

**Author's Note:**

> Someone asked for a fluffy piece - so this is my try at it.

Delphine swipes off the call with a sigh as Cosima's voicemail picks up again.  She willfully replaces the slight pang of unease with annoyance as she checks her watch.  It is 7 o'clock and she's tried to reach her lover three times in the past hour and is certain that Cosima's cell is blinking away merrily, silenced, under a discarded sweater, or an open book. Last week, after Cosima retraced her steps to the corner coffee shop certain she'd left it there, Delphine found it in the fridge, behind jars of peanut butter and 'fluff' (c'estquoi, ca??, she remembered her disbelief the first time a stoned, slit-eyed Cosima offered her a bite of her fluffernutter).

It was Cosima's turn to make dinner and she had promised to let Delphine know what, if anything, she should pick up from the store before coming home from work.  She throws a baleful glance in the direction of their neighborhood grocery as she crosses the street away from it, chin tucking into her collar against the October chill.  Once she kicks off her boots and sheds her coat at the end of this day, she is not going back out to the store, even if it means having fluffernutters - she actually shivers at the thought - for dinner.

She can hear the music coming from their apartment as soon as she gets out of the elevator and wonders again how long Cosima's charms will work against their neighbors' rising ire.  Cosima had been able to defuse Mrs. Goldblatt's anger after their next door neighbor had threatened to report them to the super by bringing over a tray of homemade brownies (though Delphine had blocked the door until she was satisfied that the sweets had no.. extra ingredients before letting Cosima out) and making friends with the septuagenarian's cat, Piddles.  It might be time for another tray of brownies soon, judging by the volume of the music that hits her ears as she unlocks the door.

"Cosima?"  There is no answer, but she can hear sounds which promise that dinner is being made coming from the kitchen.  The speakers are blaring a[ remix of some jazz song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mekGp6DeWns)\- Delphine pauses, smiles as she recognizes the lyrics - but the sight of their living room stops her short.  "Mais, non, c'est pas possible - Cosima!"

The living room, which she had painstakingly cleaned up before heading out to work that morning for the express purpose of giving Cosima a neat place in which to work on her thesis, looked ...like Cosima had been left unsupervised in it for a day.  There were clothes, tags still attached, strewn all over the floor - including what looked like a very short, very tight red dress and Delphine got briefly distracted by an image of Cosima wearing it before she spotted what looked like shopping bags from three different department stores strewn among the clothes. So much for Cosima staying home and boring through her reading...  Disbelieving, she took in the rest of the room - the couch completely covered by a dismembered copy of the New York Times (where did she even _get_ an actual newspaper), coffee table was sporting a discarded pair of Cosima's shoes and her laptop, a container of Chinese precariously perched on its keyboard and, arranged in a neat pile untouched since this morning, a stack of Cosima's library books.

"Heeeeey!"  Cosima emerges from the kitchen, smile wide, glasses slightly misty and askew atop her nose, and her apron - a gift from Delphine with 'I heart eating French' emblazoned on it (to which Cosima had added in permanent marker 'the' between words 'eating' and 'French') - sporting water stains across the stomach.  "Docteur Cormieeer, bienvenue!"

"Cosima, this is not-," Delphine stops, aghast, hand reaching toward Cosima's face, "What-? Is that blood??"

Cosima's smile falters as she reaches her own hand to her face, fingers running across the dark red smudge on her chin.  Eyes widening she pops one finger in her mouth.  "Oh!  Sauce!  Mmmm..." a jaunty wink, "I think you'll like this one, mademoiselle.  I'm making scampi fra..." she scrunches her face in thought, "Cosimolo, and I will give you three tries to figure out my secret ingredient."

Delphine bows her head, pinching the bridge of her nose, and wills herself to breathe through the tightening in her throat.  "Cosima-"

"I know, I know," Cosima's hips pick up the sway of music as she walks back to the kitchen, "the place is kind of a mess and I'm running late with dinner but wait till you hear about this article I read today - some dude at Oxford claims to have finally built a stable quantum computer, and apparently everybody - the CIA, NSA, MI6, KGB - I don't know - _everyone's_ losing their shit."

Delphine follows her to the kitchen, her heart still strumming an erratic heartbeat.  When she sees the kitchen, it receives a new jolt - it is a war zone.  The sink, which this morning cradled nothing more than her own used coffee mug, is now overflowing with pots and pans and is filled to the brim with greasy water.  Every flat surface of their tiny galley kitchen is covered in an assortment of cutting boards, scraps of vegetables, spice jars or dishtowels - Delphine counts four so far - and three separate pots are merrily bubbling over on the stovetop.

In the midst of it all Cosima is flitting from one pot to another, stirring, then turning to the open recipe book on the counter, still chattering away about the article, "..apparently, it can decode all this super secret shit in, like, seconds, dude - hold on, how much garlic... ah!  Good! - and the quantum mechanics of it all are kinda insane.."

Delphine leans against the wall, arms folded across her chest and observes, takes in the whirlwind, the purely Cosima way of being.  Her lover, her partner, co-conspirator, sounding board and, for the past six months, her live-in girlfriend has never once been able to still her mind or her body or her hands and focus on one task at a time.  Watching her now, one hand twirling in the air, giving the words spilling out of her mouth extra lift and meaning, pushing her glasses back up her nose with the back of the other hand, a wooden spoon clutched between her fingers, unmindful of the red sauce slowly dripping off it onto the floor, Delphine again feels her heart seize and throat tighten.  

She had come so close to losing it all, to losing Cosima, that moments like this still seem like a mirage - a scene about to dissolve itself into ether if observed too closely.  Cosima drives her insane sometimes, the tardiness, the sloppiness, the way she seems incapable of noticing the utter mess she leaves behind the simplest of chores, or how she repeatedly claims the last clean pair of Delphine's underwear as her own. The meticulous orderliness of Delphine's life, of her previous existence (she jokingly refers to these years as B.C., before Cosima) seems like a strange, angular kind of a dream when compared to her life now.  She takes in the view again - the coagulated grease in the sink, the clutter, Cosima nearly biting it as she slips on a scrap of carrot peel on the floor ("Whoaaaa-woo, almost - my bad, see the carrot there, will get it later, promise.") then continuing to saw through the carton of chicken stock (with a perfectly workable, perfectly visible 'pull here to open' tab on it) with their one good knife - Delphine takes it all in and feels the tears come on, is helpless against them.

"... anyway, so these qubits are supposed to be doing all kinds of Schroeder superimposing in mere milliseconds and - oh, hey, hey, what's wrong, what's going on?"  Cosima is there then, eyes intent, those hands stilled for the moment, reaching for her face, one long finger catching a tear as it slides down her cheek.  "Delphine?  Love?  Hey, talk to me."

And she can't, not now, doesn't want to invoke bad memories just then, only wants to revel in what's here, in the solid feel of Cosima under her hands, so she bends and kisses those lips, cradles that face with her own hands and breathes into Cosima's ear, "take me to bed, Cosimolo."  And Cosima knows, must see the truth in the tremor of her smile, the hitch of her breath because she just nods after those dark eyes search her own, and takes her hand, tugs her out of the kitchen - then stops and turns around as she realized Delphine is not moving.  Delphine raises one eyebrow in return and waits, lips pursing.

"...oh! Yes, right, duh," a bejeweled hand quickly flits to the stove, extinguishing lit burners, "Toootally meant to do that.  Right.  So.  Bedroom?"

This time Delphine follows, pausing just to scoop up the red dress off the floor on her way to the bedroom.  

 


End file.
